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amjustagirl · 2 years ago

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Chapter 9: rebuild from the ashes

chapters: 9/15

pairing: miya osamu x f! reader

genre: romance, angst, fluff, inarizaki shenanigans

word count: 4.6k

summary: miya osamu does not dare set fire to his heart. it burns anyway.

(prev / next)

It ends before it even begins.

Smoke without fire. Clouds without the ensuing snowstorm. All your daydreams constructed beneath the yellow forsythia shrub in Kita’s farm collapse into shrivelled twigs and burnt out husks.

It’s no fault of anyone’s but your own.

Osamu’s within his right not to find you worthy, to find that you’re not good enough for his love. You saw that as a very real possibility. You’d already tried your best to soften the blow from the rejection you saw coming from a mile away (as much as you hate it, Suna Rintaro was right, you owe him an apology) by telling yourself again and again that Osamu won’t see you that way, and that it’d all be alright, you’d move past this embarrassing blip, smile at him blithely and continue your friendship as if nothing ever happened.

But when it actually happens and you’re staring rejection in the face, you can’t.

Like a coward, you rewind your life back to the way it was pre-Osamu. You revert to your hermit-like existence to lick your fresh wounds, hiding away on your snow-capped mountain, hunkering down as a blizzard rages outside. You leave the apartment only for work, avoiding any street that might conceivably bring you even close to Onigiri Miya. He doesn’t reach out to you either - not that you’re checking your phone every few minutes to see if it buzzes with a message from him, so you stamp down your cravings for onigiris, trying your best to satisfy yourself with inferior substitutes from the combini instead.

You wish you could set loose all the ugly emotions clawing at your insides but really, you’re just numb. Unable to cry, unable to scream, anguish just trapped in your throat, threatening to cut your airflow off. You can’t even take a deep breath to clear your lungs, on the verge of choking at all times -

Your phone lights up.

“Show yourself or I’m gonna do a wellness check.”

A text from Suzuki-san. When you don’t reply, an avalanche of messages from everyone jams your phone. Morita and Ishida start flooding your inbox with jokes and memes and half-meant threats to keep delivering onigiris to your apartment until you’re sick of them. A sweet text from Miyamura-kun, who offers a listening ear, a brief text from Murata-san, who just wishes you well.

Kombu-chan looks at you like you’re dumb when you tell her you’re surprised people care about you. Her sentiment is echoed by Suzuki-san when you’re bugged into agreeing to meet for dinner (not at Onigiri Miya).

“Why would you even think that?”, she scolds, before flagging down the waiter in a bid to stuff you full of food. “Just cos the boss is blind doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t see with our two eyes.”

You don’t have an answer to that (or at least one that isn’t self-flagatory) so you shut up and eat fried chicken. If you end up crying into your beer when she passes you the little gifts from the crew (scribbles and stick figure drawings from Ishida and Morita, pastries from Miyamura-kun, a bottle of ginseng from Murata’s grandma), Suzuki-san and the bartender are kind enough not to remark on it, patting your back and calling for another round of drinks (since yours is contaminated with salt).

The blizzard starts to die. Your wounds start to scab over.

You realise you do not regret meeting Miya Osamu.

If he didn’t choose to barge into your life, you wouldn’t have left your cave, hidden from the world. If he didn’t insist on being your friend, you would never have met Suzuki-san, Ishida and Morita, Miyamura-kun and Murata-san. You wouldn’t be fast friends with Kaiyo (who’s caught up in some family emergency but darkly promises some consequences to you know who when it’s cleared up - she doesn’t respond when you ask if she’s okay), you wouldn’t have opened your heart to Kombu-chan, watched sunrises in a little seaside town nor sunsets on a mountain farm.

You look back. It’s clear how far you’ve come from before. You’ve moved forward with your life, you have friends now, adopted a cat (or rather, she’s adopted you). Being in the kitchen no longer spooks you, the ghosts that haunted you are exorcised, your inner demons caged up, unable to claw you down.

There’s progress.

There’s nothing stopping you from moving further on. Or moving in a different direction.

You call your property agent. You put your apartment up for rent, quit your job and book plane tickets immediately after the lease. It’s a mad rush to get things in order, pack up or disposing of decades worth of your parents’ belongings that you never threw away, arranging Kombu-chan’s care with your neighbour, notifying your friends that you’ll be away for a while (be safe, they all chorus, shoving charcoal pills and neck pillows your way). By your calculations, you should be able to rely on the rent from Osamu’s shop and your apartment to be away for at least half a year without digging into your savings, so everything should be okay - it should be -

You fret until your feet touch the tarmac.

It’s freeing to explore a new land, thrusting yourself amongst people who don’t speak the same language as you. You land in Bangkok first, disembarking off a budget flight since it was the cheapest out of Osaka, and you’re immediately overwhelmed. Scooters honk at you. Tangled wires hang overhead. You trip when trying to climb into a cab, scraping your knees and dropping your phone in a puddle where it dies a watery death, wiping your contact list clean, leaving you with no way of contacting anyone back home in one clean swoop.

You don’t cry over it. You don’t cry over easily over the cards life deals to you (because if you did - well, you’d never get anything done) so you just buy a cheap phone in a combini - a convenience store here, and just put the numbers that you remember by heart into its address book - your neighbour, so you can check on kombu-chan, your property agent (thankfully she’s called you enough times to know her number) and there’s another number that your fingers itch to type but you don’t, because that’s exactly who you’re trying to leave behind.

This trip is already starting on a terrible note. But then you check into a little inn owned by an older woman who reminds you of both Suzuki-san’s kindliness and Ichika’s effusiveness. It’s an unassuming little bed and breakfast with peeling walls, sitting atop a simple diner that the innkeeper and her daughters run. You can’t seem to help yourself, but you’re drawn towards the kitchen, full of bustling, good natured women singing to Thai songs, and you’re invited in without hesitation when you peek into the diner’s kitchen one hot, humid afternoon, gesturing an offer to help her prepare food.

At first, just like in Onigiri Miya, they feed you instead of letting you help, but once you arm yourself with a knife and start chopping fine, uniform pieces of garlic, they relent. The innkeeper obviously has no formal training in the kitchen, but she has years and years of experience cooking for the constant stream of guests, so she opens your eyes and tastebuds to new techniques and ingredients - you soak it all like a sponge, entranced. Lemongrass, galangal, curry powder (you’ve burnt your tongue, greedily slurping down a bowl of green curry), a variety of dangerously spicy chilis, dried and fresh, red, yellow and green, plump and large to tiny, like peppercorns (the smaller they are, the spicier - they remind you of Kaiyo), cilantro, pandan - you have so much fun just experimenting and learning new things in the kitchen under the tutelage of your innkeeper (she asks you to call her mâem, your smile doesn’t falter when you learn it means ‘mother’).

You learn even more when she insists on sending you to her sister who has a homestay of her own up north in Chiang Mai, though you have to put up a fight to insist on paying the going rate for your accommodation. The children in particular are fascinated when you willingly squat on the kitchen floor to pound herbs and spices for the salads - pomelo, papaya, green mango, and they all gang up to teach you how to ride a scooter, screaming with laughter when you topple over, landing unharmed on soft grass.

After spending three months in Thailand, you startle when you hear a smattering of Japanese, spoken by a stranger, short and slim with wild hair and bright eyes. “Konichiwa”, you bow, the words suddenly foreign in your mouth but he lights up, barrelling towards you with a warm wave and a wide grin. He introduces himself as Noya, and chuckles when you insist on calling him Noya-san, saying that it reminds him of his friends back home.

“I’m gonna ride through the Mae Hong Soon loop, wanna join me? It’ll be great having someone who can speak Thai.”

You speak rudimentary Thai at best, enough to order food perhaps, but he seems convinced you'll be an asset, so a call to a bike rental shop later, you bid your landlady a temporary farewell, and set off on the windy roads from Chiang Mai to the northernmost frontier of Thailand.

Noya-san runs a travel-related blog and youtube channel for a living, you learn.

“To fund my endless travelling!” he crows, and though you’re camera shy at first, you eventually pop in and out of his vlog, waving hi to his viewers.

Fortunately, the weather is pleasantly cool in the winter months, and riding a scooter around the mountainous towns and cities isn’t as scary as it initially seemed - even the roads in Chiang Mai are a million times less chaotic than the traffic in Bangkok where it seems anything goes. Noya-san whoops and laughs and chatters about the things he’s seen, the people he’s met, and you enjoy his company as much as he claims to appreciate yours.

“What makes you travel permanently?” you ask on a trek up Doi Inthanon, Thailand’s highest peak, aptly nicknamed the roof of Thailand. “Don’t you miss home?”

“I miss my family and friends sometimes”, he admits, leaping over rocks, dancing lightly over fallen twigs. “But I go where life leads me, and I’m always looking forward to what’s next! It’s exciting that way. I like it!”

Doesn’t it scare you, not knowing what comes next, you want to ask next, the words on the tip of your tongue though you hold yourself back, fearing you might overstep.

But he reads the doubt in your expression as clear as day. “I used to be a huge crybaby y'know”, he says conversationally, still grinning. “The coward. My grandpa shocked that out of me-I do not recommend his methods, but I see his point from him now. Life is too short for us to keep looking back. I'm gonna keep moving forward, keep doing the things that make me happy - that's all. It's as simple as that.”

“Is that what you tell your followers online?” you ask drolly, though he laughs, taking no offence at your gentle retort.

“It’s what I truly live by”, he declares just as you reach the peak. “C’mon - isn’t it a waste to hang back cos you’re scared of what life has to offer? Look at all of this!”

(a waste, he says)

This time, you take a look. Beyond the swarms of tourists and convoys of honking buses, past the royal pagodas that glint gold in the sun, you find yourself gazing at gauze-like clouds, peering into lush valleys and forested ridges.

“It’s pretty”, you say.

The terracotta steeped canyons, the leaf-green of the rainforest foliage, the clear blue of widening skies, the land before you humming with life. “It is, isn’t it?”, he exclaims, bouncing on his heels. “Don’t waste life when it has so much to offer!”

Yet - yet. You can’t help but look back. Even after you spend the rest of the afternoon trekking through waterfalls and admiring ancient trees, you can’t help but think of a little seaside town, with nothing more noteworthy than a little hill overlooking the vast blue sea. Though you’re sure there are prettier sunsets out there in the wider world, more colourful, more vibrant, but that particular sunset where the blue-silver world turned pink-gold, aflame with the light of the dying sun -

You try your best not to, but you still think about Miya Osamu once in a moon.

You ruminate on him quite a lot at the start of your trip, wondering if he only befriended you because he pitied you, if you ever stood a chance with him or if it were all wishful thinking, if you’d perhaps been someone better - less of a waste, less of a burden. Maybe then he might’ve looked at you as more than just a friend.

(a waste, he says)

Loneliness sweeps over you, drowns you with longing, a cruel tidal wave. You’re soaked to the bone, cold and gasping for air.

“Is something wrong?” Noya-san asks, when your gaze grows distant.

You have no right to look back to what you've been running from when you have every opportunity to keep moving forward. Everyone you've met here is kind and generous and gentle, taking you into their hearth and home even though you barely speak their language. Thinking too much about Osamu slows you down ( not that you're sure of your next destination though that's something you're figuring out slowly, one day at a time ) so you redirect your thoughts to the adventure you've impulsively set out on .

You pull yourself back together. “Nothing’s wrong”, you reply.

Still, still.

Once in a while, once in a moon, little things slip by your defences, reminding you of him.

The discovery of onigiris in the combinis here, wrapped in fluorescent green and orange plastic. The silhouette of a broad-shouldered stranger makes you double take. The smell of cooking rice leaves you lightheaded sometimes. It’s not something to be surprised about. You let him graze the edges of your soul. That’s not easily forgotten.

(It’s pretty, he says.)

(You thought he might’ve been looking at you.)

You think about the what-ifs and the could-have-beens a little less each passing day, a little less caught up in your dreams and fantasies. But once in a moon, you wallow in self pity for reaching out to someone who doesn’t dream of you. Sometimes you buy a postcard, sit yourself down at some cafe with a piping cup of tea. You put pen to paper, addressing letters to Osamu that you have no intention of sending, wringing out the jumbled mess of thoughts and feelings from your system.

So when you reach northernmost city of Mae Hong Son, heading to the night market at Noya-san’s behest, because he claims that he has a craving for pad see ew and oyster omelette, you buy a hand drawn postcard depicting a snapshot of rural Thailand (with a marked resemblance to the Kita’s farm in Hyogo), laying on your bed on your belly to write ‘til it's past midnight. No one needs to know that you’re still embarrassingly lovelorn, so you tuck the postcard deep into your backpack with its cousins, stowed away from the light of day.

But Noya-san seems to have an uncanny knack for seeing right through you. “What about you?” he cheerfully asks during a pitstop for coffee.

“Where is life taking you?”

Sunflowers dance in the field, waving at you.

“Where is life taking me?”, you echo blankly before frowning. “I…don’t know?”

He chuckles, sprite-like. “S’okay. I get it. I’m the same too! I just let the wind blow me to the next place, as long as it’s in the general direction of my goal to see the world and do things I haven’t done before. As long as I’m moving forward to my next destination, I figure I’m on the right track.”

“Huh.”

“Yep!” you marvel at his ability to carry the weight of a conversation all by himself. “It’s what I admire most about my friends - something they all had in common besides volleyball, even in high school. They’re the best - Asahi and Ryu and Chikara and Hisahi and Kazuhito, cos’ even when they weren’t sure about stuff, even if they were scared or on the verge of defeat like coach said - volleyball is a sport where you’re always looking up! - and they’d get up, keep chasing the ball, moving forward even though everyone else counted us out. Super manly of them, y’know?”

“Uh huh”, you reply, confused. “I guess that’s how you guys made it to Nationals from nowhere?”

“It’s not volleyball”, he says. “I mean - it is kinda about volleyball, but not volleyball - if you get what I mean. In hindsight, it’s so cool what volleyball ended up teaching us all about life. Like - there’s no point running away from things, you’ll just regret it. Or if you’re not moving forward, you’re just gonna get left behind. Volleyball’s just a game we all played in high school, but it’s so cool that it’s taught us so much.“

“It’s a waste I never played it in school”, you reply, your tone light. “Maybe I’d have learnt those lessons a little sooner.”

“Never too late to start”, he cheers, smile bright. “I can teach you!”

He doubles over with laughter when you backtrack immediately, moaning about your back and the fact that you'll probably fall on your face in the dust if you even tried slapping a ball over the net ( we can just try passing, he chuckles ) and when he magicks a ball out of thin air when you reach your accommodation for the night in Pai, you make sure to hide until he's distracted teaching the village's children how to bump a ball high in the air.

You sit in the shade of a banana tree, away from the gleeful squeals from both Noya and the children, your hidden postcards to Osamu spread out on the sundrenched grass. This trip is good for self-introspection, you think wryly. Not quite the cliche of an eat pray love journey, because strictly speaking you’ve only achieved the first of those goals, stuffing your belly full with exciting new foods, but it’s been good for you nonetheless.

Because you realise pre-Osamu, you’d been frozen in place, going into a deep hibernation alone in a dark, cold cave. All your life, you’ve been told by your parents who you are, what you must do yet you fail miserably at doing precisely that after they pass, leaving you alone in the world to the wolves. Critics ravage the restaurant once it’s in your hands, sneeringly writing how sad it is for a daughter to tarnish her family’s good name even though you were already steering the restaurant solo once your father took ill. A lone woman can’t take on the culinary establishment whilst struggling to keep afloat.

It’s easier to bail.

So you did. Rented out the shop (to Osamu, as it turns out, it’s better anyway in his hands), took up a job at the combini which isn’t too taxing, which was adjacent to what you’ve been trained for (everything but taking up your father’s knife). You hunker down, barely living life, not knowing how to step out of your prison cell even after the doors are unlocked and you’re free to go because you were never allowed to live for yourself before.

It’s Osamu who tried his best to teach you.

He taught you to be brave, to take the first baby steps out of your cave into the great, wide world. He taught you to bask in the sun’s warmth, to be comfortable and happy to be around people and accept that sometimes, surprisingly, people might like to be around you too. It’s because of him that you no longer shy away from the heat and fire of a kitchen stove despite your scars from the past.

You have him to thank for all that.

But now you also realise that even as you look forward, moving towards the horizon, you’re still keeping your scars under wraps, still running away from the skeletons in your cave, the ghosts of your past. It weighs you down even as you’re pushing to move inexorably forward, drags you back under the waves.

It's time you learned to make peace with what you've been trying to leave behind.

(a waste, he says)

(he’s right)

You can cook.

Good food, not mere sustenance but food that nourishes, nurtures. Onigiri Miya is testament that food binds a family together, brings a community close. It’s a skill that was a curse to learn, but it’s now a blessing you can share with others.

After all, it’s a waste not to.

“Noya-san, may I cook dinner for you?” you ask. It’s Noya’s last night in Thailand and you’re back in Chiang Mai, bunkering down in the homestay where you know the kitchen is always open to you.

“You can cook?!” he exclaims, excited.“That’s so cool! Please! Of course!”

He chatters at you as you bustle around your host’s kitchen. You’ve offered to cook for the entire family tonight, and though the matriarch of the family hovers around to keep a watchful eye over her domain (lest you burn the whole place down accidentally), everyone oohs and aahs when you present the fruit of your labour, slaving over charcoal fires, pounding away to create the fresh fruit salad, spicy curries and perfectly grilled meats that you’ve spent the last few months learning.

“It’s still a work in progress, but I hope you enjoy it”, you tell everyone, because you would never dream of being presumptuous enough to claim you’ve learn a whole other culture’s cuisine in a mere matter of months, but you’re happy with what you’ve produced, almost proud even, especially when your host (you call her bpaa, or auntie) pats your arm and takes a second helping.

“It’s so, so good, I can’t stop eating”, Noya says, looking like a demented chipmunk, cheeks bulging with food. “This sucks - I should’ve stayed longer here so I can eat more of your cooking.” He stops to shovel another spoonful of curry and sticky rice into his mouth, laughing you off as you remind him to stop and swallow, or he’ll choke. “Gods, I’m gonna be dreaming of this for a long, long time - ”

“The next time you’re in Osaka, I’ll cook for you.”

Impulse takes over before you realise you actually mean what you say, and he seals the deal by grabbing your hand, pumping it up and down enthusiastically, and he doesn’t even deny it when you lament that your short friendship seems now to be wholly based on food.

When day breaks, your paths diverge. Noya-san he hops on a bus headed further north. “To infinity and beyond”, he cheers as you wave him off. You hunker down, returning back to Bangkok under the tutelage of mâem, who welcomes you back with open arms and you’re determined to learn as much as you can, formulating new recipes, new ideas, new concoctions with every passing day, returning to Osaka when she declares she has nothing left to teach you and shoos you off with the air of a mother bird shooing her offspring out of her nest.

You return to Osaka in spring just as the cherry blossoms burst overripe, white and pink. You keep your return under wraps, picking Kombu-chan up from your old neighbour (she slinks around your ankles, sniffing you suspiciously until she decides you’re alright and she forgives you for not being around), renting a tiny studio apartment, reserving whatever scant courage you have to reach out to some of your father’s old associates - suppliers, vendors, fellow chefs, those who were friendly and kind to you before. You intend to start small with a home dining business where you’d venture out to people’s houses as a private chef, whipping up dishes inspired in equal parts by your childhood and your travels abroad.

As it happens, people are kinder to you than you expect.

Word of mouth spreads like wildfire once one of your father’s old friends drops your name with a food critic contact of his (dear, almost deaf old Masahiro-san), and you impress him with your sixteen-course omakase meal that featuring a hodge podge of perfectly marbled otoro and yellow curried soft shell crab handrolls, pearls of orange ikura served with fruit - and before you know it, you’re booked out for weekends on end. You barely even need a website, your phone number circulating through Osaka’s food aficionados. Your father’s knife in your hands, you make a splash in the local food scene.

Before you know it, it’s summer. Hot and humid and muggy, the back of your shirt sticking to your skin uncomfortably, and you’re dreaming of leaving the city once more when your phone rings.

“Hello!” Ichika sings. “It’s been a while!”

She scolds you for being so hard to locate (I dropped my phone and it broke, you try to explain), and after exchanging pleasantries, it turns out she needs a well-trained chef to feed some exclusive guest that booked a week’s stay at her guesthouse (for whatever reason, they seem to want to get away from it all, but they’re so SO picky about food, and there’s no way obaa-san or I can cope with their demands, let alone satisfy them). You can’t turn down an offer to escape the searing heat, so you pack your bags and board a train for the cooler plains and ridges of Hyogo again.

You come full circle by returning to Hyogo.

Obaa-chan greets you with a pat to your cheek, more wrinkles in her weathered face. Ichika’s trio of daughters are older and no less shy, clustering about you when you give out candies and cakes. Kita-san seems almost taken aback when you arrive, though you later learn it’s because Ichika surprised him with your arrival. “Do first, ask permission later”, she says breezily. “Shinsuke doesn’t mind you coming one bit, though maybe he’s just a little surprised - but it doesn’t matter! We need your help anyway - c’mon, we can head to the market together to make sure you get what you need.”

You retrace your steps. Ichika puts you in the same bedroom you had last fall, facing the forsythia shrub you hid beneath though it’s now lush and green. The sunrises are just as glorious as you remember, the sunsets no less majestic. Though you’re here for work, spending hours prepping in the guesthouse’s kitchen, it almost feels like you’ve rewound time by almost a year back to the happiest week of your life.

Osamu’s mixed up in those memories too, and you still think of him once in a moon. Sometimes you expect to see him sprawled out beneath the sun-yellow forsythia shrub, sometimes you still long to drink the honey in his eyes. But these thoughts no longer drag you beneath the waves, you savour the sweetness of them, like fresh summer plums, allowing the bitter tang of disappointment to fade.

You’ll make fresh memories here of feeding your guests, nourishing them with the skill of your hands and delighting them with your flavour concocted with the power of your imagination. You’ll make friends with Ichika and Obaa-san and Shinsuke again, delight in the antics of their daughters, relearn how to watch the sun rise and set with a smile.

Life can be good. Life is good.

You’re happy. You’re okay.

a/n: hello my bbs, i'm back!

#haikyuu angst #hq x reader #haikyuu x reader #miya osamu x you #miya osamu #miya osamu x reader #miya osamu x y/n #Miya osamu x you #osamu x y/n #osamu x you #osamu x reader #Haikyuu romance #Inarizaki

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